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Future Flying Cars
Flying cars have always been a stable of science fiction. We saw them in everything from The Jetsons to Blade Runner to every conceivable future urban setting since the thirties and forties. The thing about science fiction, though, is that it if it is possible, it quite often becomes science fact. Future flying cars are already in design, and possible prospects have been examined by everyone from small firms like Moller International to Ford Automotive. Some early model prototypes have already been released and even flown, and designs are currently be examined for purposes as diverse as ambulance, traffic surveillance, border patrol, and police work, among other things.
Future flying cars would be available for more than just government use, though, and wouldn’t require the sort of complex and expensive pilot training a modern helicopter operator has to acquire before flying. Future flying cars would be easy to operate with minimal training, and available for about the cost of a normal modern automobile. Mass production and simplification would mean decreases in both price and learning curve for operators—the old dream of everyone having a car in the garage would now shift to everyone having a flying car in the garage.
Problems and Solutions with Future Flying Cars
A number of obstacles stand in the way of widespread use of flying cars in the future, but these obstacles are already being examined for bypass and defeat by flying car technicians in the top production corporations responsible for researching what will become the luxury flying cars of the future. One such obstacle is safety – what would happen if a fling car’s engines were to fail, sending it plummeting from the sky? Could one crash? Could they be used by terrorists in possible attacks?
Possibly, say designers, but new technology is making that more and more unlikely. Advanced safety features including backup generators and drive shafts would make engine failure next to impossible, much like modern aircraft engines (although even more stable due to the smaller size and routine checkup requirements). Crashing would be prevented by sophisticated onboard computer systems which would take over in the event of operator failure, preventing catastrophe by leveling out and using radar and GPS to navigate to a safe landing.
This would also prevent a dedicated terrorist attack. The same onboard computer that prevented crash would be built under certain restrictions. Federal no fly zones could be created using GPS and signal beacons which would tell the future flying cars’ on board computers that they could pass no further. A warning would first be issued to the driver, and then the computer would take over, steering the car away from the secure area. If the activity seemed particularly suspicious, the car could autopilot into a holding position, where it would wait until authorities arrived to investigate the drivers activities. In this way, not only would future flying cars not make terrorism easier, but they could potentially help to catch terrorists and other criminals.
Luxury Flying Cars of the Future
At first, future flying cars will only be the “luxury flying cars of the future.” They will be fairly expensive (though not prohibitively) – much like buying a very nice new sports car, for instance. They will only be flown by the upper income bracket, and will no doubt be built with every luxury feature available to the modern luxury road automobile. Some flying cars, in fact, may even be designed allowing them to both fly through the air and drive on the roads – this will especially be useful in the current state of legal affairs, where taking off and landing is illegal anywhere but at designated airports. Luxury flying cars of the future – the near future – could fly from one town to another, land at the airport, and then drive on the roads into the town itself. The advantages to this are clear, especially since such luxury flying cars would undoubtedly be VTOL craft – vertical take off and landing. In other words, they could land more or less anywhere they wanted to, the way a helicopter works now.
Luxury flying cars of the future are becoming less and less future with every passing day. Humanity’s obsession with the flying car phenomena has ensured designers and technicians that there is indeed a very large market for future flying car technology, and they will no doubt compete heavily to reach that market first. Flying cars in 2020? It’s possible. It’s more than possible: it’s probable. Prototypes already exist. As the technology rises to the occasion, future flying cars will get cheaper, safer, and easier to build, and soon, taking that cross country trip to the Caribbean will be a whole lot easier – as long as you don’t mind the age old road trip question of “are we there yet?”
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